Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Excelsior Day 3
June 24, 2024
excelsior Riley vacation

On Day 3 of our trip, we started in Indiana at our hotel close to the Indiana Dunes National Park. We went there after a somewhat subpar continental breakfast at our hotel. The Dunes Park was pretty cool, with lots of sand and a view of the lake. It seems like a beautiful recreation area for people who live nearby. You could see Chicago across the lake.

It was interesting how people sat close to the water, which you would not see at an ocean beach due to changing tides. However, as Riley points out, the lakes are deadly with lots of rip tides, making it dangerous to go out in the water. The lifeguards seemed happy to just leave you to die, as we overheard them on the way out. There were sand slides near the beach, which would have been fun to slide down with waxed boards like we did at the Great Sand Dunes National Monument.

Excelsior Day 2
June 23, 2024
excelsior Riley vacation

In the morning, we got up from the hotel and found that there were no bath towels. We had to dry off with only hand towels, of which there were two. We managed to dry off and get out in the morning and decided to head to breakfast.

There was a location called Juneberry that was touted as the best breakfast place in Cleveland by some places anyway, so we headed in that direction. When we got there, the wait for Juneberry was an hour, which was a lot more time than we wanted to spend waiting for food before we got on with our day. Since we had passed a donut shop called Goldie’s on the way there, on the same block, we went to Goldie’s, and both got long johns, chocolate covered top with vanilla cream filling, and I got a coffee. It was totally fulfilling, and as we walked past the Juneberry on the way to the car, we laughed at the people standing around waiting for their truly frou-frou and bougie experience in their fancy breakfast place.

Excelsior Day 1
June 22, 2024
excelsior Riley vacation

We set out on our cross-country road trip in our rented Jeep Compass. We used RoadTrippers.com to set a trail through using all of our destinations. We chose several destinations for our first day on Saturday. We thought we would stop at Hershey Park to see Chocolate World, not to go into the park itself, but just the making of chocolate, as a quick stop between our destinations to break up the long travel day. We also added a couple of other stops, including Falling Water, Ohiopyle State Park, and the abandoned PA Turnpike Tunnel with a stop in Pittsburgh, just to have seen Pittsburgh. There could be another stop on the way to Cleveland, our final destination, to see a co-worker race his car in a demo track run.

Unfortunately, we could not get tickets for Falling Water on such short notice, and having Ohiopyle as a destination took us an hour out of our way on an already long driving day. So we skipped those two destinations and instead hit some of the other sites we intended to see that day. We did make it to Hershey. Hershey’s Chocolate World has changed a lot from when I was younger. Riley and I had a good time walking around their gift shop, looking at some of the t-shirts with old Hershey ad campaigns, like “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!” Ultimately, we got on that ride to see how they make chocolate. There were samples available at the end of the ride. Riley got a chocolate bar, and I got some Twizzlers, a company that Hershey had apparently acquired a long time ago.

Blind Pull
June 18, 2024
home house

It’s been a pretty challenging couple of weeks. Saturday before last, I returned home from a work trip to Columbus to celebrate my birthday with the family. We went out to Founding Farmers in King of Prussia with my mom and Nana, and it was generally a good time. They gifted me a bidet. That’s a whole thing, and a story for another time.

On the Sunday after, we found out that the hot water heater was leaking. Thankfully, the heater itself was still under warranty, but the basement carpet was soaked, and tons of random things on the basement floor were steeping in soggy carpet. We spent a good bit of Sunday and Monday moving things to the dry half of the basement and sucking up the water with our now-copious wetvacs.

S3 Images
June 12, 2024
blog s3

I’m working on a feature for the site that allows you to use an S3 bucket to host images. Presently, I’m expecting to use Digital Ocean’s S3 hosting to hold the images for this site, primarily because the setup is simpler.

The challenge is that this site is static in a git repo, but I don’t want to put the images into the repository. I want to reference the images in S3, and have it serve them via a URL that points directly to the bucket (or really the CDN proxy that sits in front of it). What I’d prefer is to specify where the image will be in the post content via URL, and then if the image doesn’t exist, I would be able to drag and drop an image onto the placeholder on the page. The server that serves this site would automatically upload the image to the specified destination and when you reload, the image appears.